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  • What the Dickens?

    Tuesday 7 February 2012

    Categories: Education, Literacy, Media Influence

    On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, his biographer, Claire Tomalin, claims that, “Today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being raised on dreadful TV programmes”. There ARE some dreadful television programmes today, as there were in the 1970s as I grew up, but there are some brilliant ones too. I wonder how many young people saw the excellent adaptation of ‘Great Expectations’ at Christmas, and were encouraged to try reading the novel as a consequence?

    Today’s children are used to multiple stimuli as they work or play, and I agree that they can find it challenging to focus on just one thing, to the exclusion of others, but I don’t think the issue with tackling dense and lengthy Victorian novels is just to do with attention span. It’s also to do with maturity and our capacity to cope with the subtlety and complexity of literature which was written for a very different audience.

    Claire Tomalin is right that the themes Dickens addresses are just as relevant today. The issue, I would suggest, is more to do with difficulties in literary style and taste. The Victorians loved melodrama; they coped better than a contemporary readership with the use of coincidence as a plot driver, and, in the absence of television programmes of any quality, they read, discussed and speculated about the latest serialised issue of a Dickens novel as we might about what is happening in Eastenders or Hollyoaks. Dickens was still writing the later stages of the novels as the earlier instalments were released – allegedly as he finished ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ he was receiving impassioned pleas from his public ‘not to let Little Nell die….’ (She did die, but it’s interesting to speculate about how Dickens may have been influenced by the response of those reading the first chapters as he completed the last).

    Once the instalments were combined, what resulted was, in some cases, a very weighty tome. And, in my view, readers have to discover Dickens at the right time. Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, has pronounced that, “Every child ought to read a Dickens novel by the age of 11”. I love English, which was always my favourite subject at school, and I love Dickens. I completed an English degree and subsequently became an English teacher. Over a thirty year career I taught a wide range of literature to a significant number of children of different ages. I have enjoyed introducing them to classic fiction, but it needs to be extremely carefully done, and I cannot agree with those who seem to believe that we should ‘make’ children read certain novels or novelists, at certain stages (as if every 11 year old reader can cope with the same diet), because it is in some way good for them.

    I was introduced to Dickens at aged 12 when we were given ‘David Copperfield’ at school. I have to say I found it extremely hard going – although I was bright, good at English and loved reading. I didn’t touch another Dickens novel until I was in my second year at university when I had to study the author, and I reluctantly picked up ‘Oliver Twist’. I thought it was tremendous, and I went on to read everything Dickens had written. The time was right – but it hadn’t been, for me at least, at 12.

    So despite what Claire Tomalin says about ‘dreadful TV programmes’, I would recommend that parents who want their children to experience classic English literature use some of the excellent TV and film adaptations of classic novels as a way in. And encourage your children to try the novels when they are ready – but not before.

    Posted by Jill Berry

Your comments

I really agree with your thoughts about coming to Dickens at the right age. I was a prolific reader as a child & still am, but I found Great Expectations incredibly dull as a 13 year old attending an academic selective school. I did however enjoy reading Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm etc. My niece read Mill on the Floss as a year 8 at a rural comprehensive and at the end of the school term could not tell me anything about it at all, it seemed far heavier going than the books my own year 8 daughter was reading at a highly selective West London girls’ school. My son is at a selective intake prep school in year 7 and they haven’t read any Dickens either, but he did read Lord of the Rings when he was in year 5 so is obviously an avid reader.

By fiflippy on Wednesday 14 March 2012

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